ON SURVEILLANCE: NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH
Screenshots of different features of the police portal for the Amazon Ring doorbell network.
Neighbourhood social media apps such as Nextdoor or Neighbors (by Amazon Ring) promise a feeling of safety: people are able to share their concerns and see what others report as suspicious in their local area. By installing these apps anyone can easily share footage from home security cameras and, at the same time, have access to a feed of footage neighbours have shared.
Despite reports showing that crime has fallen steadily in the last decade the popularity of such apps is increasing; fitting into the category of fear-based social media, these apps contribute to a false sense that danger is on the rise. And for the companies behind them, "fear is good for business” as growing fearfulness leads to more people thinking they need surveillance devices in their house in order to be safe.
These apps place power in the individual’s hands to determine whether someone does or does not belong in a community, and as a result introduce bias and reinforce unfair policing, which can then potentially feed into a vicious cycle of fear and violence. Racial profiling is common, with a large majority of those reported as “Suspicious” being people of colour. If this technology is helping perpetuate stereotypes, is it making your neighbourhood safer - or just more racist?
This illusion of the rise of criminality promotes a falsified narrative, one the police have conveniently used to push surveillance equipment into people’s homes and makes it easier for police to request footage in bulk, sometimes cutting corners instead of getting warrants. In the US, all but two states now have police participating in Amazon’s Ring network, and in the UK the tech giant has given the recording devices to at least four forces to pass on to residents. At least five other forces have promoted the all-seeing doorbells via money-off vouchers or discount codes, and others are currently in talks with Ring.
When even Amazon employees say that “[t]he deployment of connected home security cameras that allow footage to be queried centrally are simply not compatible with a free society”, we have to ask ourselves, how much surveillance is enough until we’re all safe according to the police? It seems they can’t get enough eyes on the streets; London, for example, is already the 3rd most surveilled city in the world with almost 75 CCTV cameras for every 1,000 people, and yet the Met has received a £243,000 sponsorship from Amazon to deploy 1,000 Ring cameras in the capital. Do we really need more cameras? Following us from the moment we set foot outside our front doors? Connected to police databases? The collection of more and more data on us all does not necessarily mean better outcomes solving cases - but it does mean harm to a free society while it normalises mass surveillance.
Expanding the surveillance network to put police eyes in people’s peepholes blurs the lines between public and private spaces. Gathering this sort of data in bulk ‘just in case’ something of importance was captured directly affects our right to privacy from the moment we step out of our house. Our right to protest, our ability to freely criticise the government and express dissenting ideas, even our personal safety; the very thing most individuals are trying to protect when purchasing these devices, is then threatened when we unwittingly turn our neighbour or ourselves into the eye of the state.